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SUSAN B. ANTHONY
REBEL, CRUSADER, HUMANITARIAN
BY ALMA LUTZ
ZENGER PUBLISHING CO. INC. BOX 9883, WASHINGTON DC 20015
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony]
Alma Lutz was born and brought up in North Dakota, graduated from the
Emma Willard School and Vassar College, and attended the Boston
University School of Business Administration. She has written numerous
articles and pamphlets and for many years has been a contributor to
_The Christian Science Monitor_. Active in organizations working for
the political, civil, and economic rights of women, she has also been
interested in preserving the records of women's role in history and
serves on the Advisory Board of the Radcliffe Women's Archives. Miss
Lutz is the author of _Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy_ (1929),
_Created Equal, A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ (1940),
_Challenging Years, The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch_, with
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1940), and the editor of _With Love Jane,
Letters from American Women on the War Fronts_ (1945).
© 1959 by Alma Lutz
Member of the Authors League of America
Published by arrangement with
Beacon Press
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lutz, Alma.
Susan B. Anthony: rebel, crusader, humanitarian.
Reprint of the ed. published by Beacon Press, Boston.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Anthony, Susan Brownell, 1820-1906.
[JK1899.A6L8 1975] 324'.3'0924 [B] 75-37764
ISBN 0-89201-017-7
Printed in the United States of America
_To the young women of today_
PREFACE
To strive for liberty and for a democratic way of life has always been
a noble tradition of our country. Susan B. Anthony followed this
tradition. Convinced that the principle of equal rights for all, as
stated in the Declaration of Independence, must be expressed in the
laws of a true republic, she devoted her life to the establishment of
this ideal.
Because she recognized in Negro slavery and in the legal bondage of
women flagrant violations of this principle, she became an active,
courageous, effective antislavery crusader and a champion of civil and
political rights for women. She saw women's struggle for freedom from
legal restrictions as an important phase in the development of
American democracy. To her this struggle was never a battle of the
sexes, but a battle such as any freedom-loving people would wage for
civil and political rights.
While her goals for women were only partially realized in her
lifetime, she prepared the soil for the acceptance not only of her
long-hoped-for federal woman suffrage amendment but for a worldwide
recognition of human rights, now expressed in the United Nations
Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. She looked forward to the
time when throughout the world there would be no discrimination
because of race, color, religion, or sex.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"The letters of a person ...," said Thomas Jefferson, "form the only
full and genuine journal of his life." Susan B. Anthony's letters,
hundreds of them, preserved in libraries and private collections, and
her diaries have been the basis of this biography, and I acknowledge
my indebtedness to the following libraries and their helpful
librarians: the American Antiquarian Society; the Bancroft Library of
the University of California; the Boston Public Library; the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Indiana State Library; the
Kansas Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the Susan B.
Anthony Memorial Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, which
has been transferred to the Henry E. Huntington Library; the New York
Public Library; the New York State Library; the Ohio State Library;
the Radcliffe Women's Archives; the Seneca Falls Historical Society;
the Smith College Library; the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Inc.,
Rochester, New York; the University of Rochester Library; the
University of Kentucky Library; and the Vassar College Library.
I am particularly indebted to Lucy E. Anthony, who asked me to write a
biography of her aunt, lent me her aunt's diaries, and was most
generous with her records and personal recollections. To her and to
her sister, Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon, I am very grateful for photographs
and for permission to quote from Susan B. Anthony's diaries and from
her letters and manuscripts.
Ida Husted Harper's _Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_, written in
collaboration with Susan B. Anthony, and the _History of Woman
Suffrage_, compiled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, have been invaluable. As
many of the letters and documents used in the preparation of these
books were destroyed, they have preserved an important record of the
work of Susan B. Anthony and of the woman's rights movement.
I am especially grateful to Martha Taylor Howard for her unfailing
interest and for the use of the valuable Susan B. Anthony Memorial
Collection which she initiated and developed in Rochester, New York;
and to Una R. Winter for her interest and for the use of her Susan B.
Anthony Collection, most of which is now in the Henry E. Huntington
Library.
I thank Edna M. Stantial for permission to examine and quote from the
Blackwell Papers; Anna Dann Mason for permission to read her
reminiscences and the many letters written to her by Susan B. Anthony;
Ellen Garrison for permission to quote from letters of Lucretia Mott
and Martha C. Wright; Eleanor W. Thompson for copies of Susan B.
Anthony's letters to Amelia Bloomer; Henry R. Selden II whose
grandfather was Susan B. Anthony's lawyer during her trial for voting;
Judge John Van Voorhis whose grandfather was associated with Judge
Selden in Miss Anthony's defense; William B. Brown for information
about the early history of Adams, Massachusetts, the Susan B. Anthony
birthplace, and the Friends Meeting House in Adams; Dr. James Harvey
Young for information about Anna E. Dickinson; Margaret Lutz Fogg for
help in connection with the trial of Susan B. Anthony; Dr. Blake
McKelvey, City Historian of Rochester; Clara Sayre Selden and Wheeler
Chapin Case of the Rochester Historical Society; the grand-nieces of
Susan B. Anthony, Marion and Florence Mosher; Matilda Joslyn Gage II;
Florence L. C. Kitchelt; and Rose Arnold Powell.
I thank _The Christian Science Monitor_ for permission to use portions
of an article published on October 24, 1958.
I am especially grateful to A. Marguerite Smith for her constructive
criticism of the manuscript and her unfailing encouragement.
ALMA LUTZ
_Highmeadow_
_Berlin, New York_
TABLE OF CONTENTS
QUAKER HERITAGE 1
WIDENING HORIZONS 15
FREEDOM TO SPEAK 28
A PURSE OF HER OWN 39
NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 56
THE TRUE WOMAN 67
THE ZEALOT 79
A WAR FOR FREEDOM 92
THE NEGRO'S HOUR 108
TIMES THAT TRIED WOMEN'S SOULS 125
HE ONE WORD OF THE HOUR 138
WORK, WAGES, AND THE BALLOT 149
THE INADEQUATE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT 159
A HOUSE DIVIDED 169
A NEW SLANT ON THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 180
TESTING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 198
"IS IT A CRIME FOR A CITIZEN ... TO VOTE?" 209
SOCIAL PURITY 217
A FEDERAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT 226
RECORDING WOMEN'S HISTORY 235
IMPETUS FROM THE WEST 241
VICTORIES IN THE WEST 252
LIQUOR INTERESTS ALERT FOREIGN-BORN VOTERS AGAINST WOMAN
SUFFRAGE 266
AUNT SUSAN AND HER GIRLS 274
PASSING ON THE TORCH 285
SUSAN B. ANTHONY OF THE WORLD 299
NOTES 311
BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
INDEX 335
TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-five _Frontispiece_
(From a daguerrotype, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, N.Y.)
Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony 2
(From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by
Ida Husted Harper)
Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony 3
(From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by
Ida Husted Harper)
Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts 5
(The Smith Studio, Adams, Massachusetts)
Frederick Douglass 22
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her "Bloomer costume" 27
(From _The Lily_)
Lucy Stone 29
(From _Lucy Stone_ by Alice Stone Blackwell. Courtesy Little,
Brown and Company)
Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-four 31
(Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York)
James and Lucretia Mott 33
(From _James and Lucretia Mott_ by Anna D. Hallowell.
Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Company)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her son, Henry 40
Ernestine Rose 42
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Parker Pillsbury 49
(From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children)
Merritt Anthony 57
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)
Susan B. Anthony, 1856 68
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)
Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell 72
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)
William Lloyd Garrison 86
(From _William Lloyd Garrison and His Times_ by Oliver
Johnson)
Susan B. Anthony 97
Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony 110
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)
Wendell Phillips 114
(From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children)
George Francis Train 132
(Courtesy New York Public Library)
Anna E. Dickinson 144
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Paulina Wright Davis 165
Isabella Beecher Hooker 167
Victoria C. Woodhull 181
Susan B. Anthony, 1871 187
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)
Judge Henry R. Selden 203
(Courtesy Henry R. Selden II)
"The Woman Who Dared" 206
(New York _Daily Graphic_, June 5, 1873)
Aaron A. Sargent 229
(Courtesy Library of Congress)
Clara Bewick Colby 232
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Matilda Joslyn Gage 236
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Anna Howard Shaw 248
(From a photograph by Mary Carnel)
Harriot Stanton Blatch 250
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)
The Anthony home, Rochester, New York 255
(Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York)
Susan B. Anthony at her desk 257
(Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts)
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 259
Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 262
and Susan B. Anthony
Ida Husted Harper 271
(Courtesy Library of Congress)
Rachel Foster Avery 275
(Courtesy Library of Congress)
Harriet Taylor Upton 276
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)
Carrie Chapman Catt 289
(Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts)
Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony 297
Susan B. Anthony at the age of eighty-five 301
(From a photograph by J. E. Hale)
Susan B. Anthony, 1905 309
(From a photograph by Ellis)
QUAKER HERITAGE
"If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned
eleven-year-old Susan with her father, "then why don't you make her
overseer?"
"It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It
would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill."
This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To
enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of
entertainment, for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the
nimble fingers of the weavers, and by the general air of efficiency.
Admiringly she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from
Vermont. When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something
wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always called out to
Sally Ann, "I'll tend your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann
never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she
was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.[1]
The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great
promise in the United States, when Susan B. Anthony was born on
February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock,
near Adams, Massachusetts. Enterprising young men like her father,
Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every
rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they
could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at
least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and
the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a
few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen.
When Susan was two years old, her father built a cotton factory of
twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's
meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York.
The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as
was the custom, in the home of the millowner; Susan's mother, Lucy
Read Anthony, although she had three small daughters to care for,
Guelma, Susan, and Hannah, boarded eleven of the millworkers with
only the help of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for her after
school hours. Lucy Anthony cooked their meals on the hearth of the big
kitchen fireplace, and in the large brick oven beside it baked crisp
brown loaves of bread. In addition, washing, ironing, mending, and
spinning filled her days. But she was capable and strong and was doing
only what all women in this new country were expected to do. She
taught her young daughters to help her, and Susan, even before she was
six, was very useful; by the time she was ten she could cook a good
meal and pack a dinner pail.
[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony]
* * * * *
Hard work and skill were respected as Susan grew up in the rapidly
expanding young republic which less than fifty years before had been
founded and fought for. Settlers, steadily pushing westward, had built
new states out of the wilderness, adding ten to the original thirteen.
Everywhere the leaven of democracy was working and men were putting
into practice many of the principles so boldly stated in the
Declaration of Independence, claiming for themselves equal rights and
opportunities. The new states entered the Union with none of the
traditional property and religious limitations on the franchise, but
with manhood suffrage and all voters eligible for office. The older
states soon fell into line, Massachusetts in 1820 removing property
qualifications for voters. Before long, throughout the United States,
all free white men were enfranchised, leaving only women, Negroes, and
Indians without the full rights of citizenship.
[Illustration: Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony]
Although women freeholders had voted in some of the colonies and in
New Jersey as late as 1807,[2] just as in England in the fifteenth
franchise had gradually found its way into the statutes, and women's
rights as citizens were ignored, in spite of the contribution they had
made to the defense and development of the new nation. However,
European travelers, among them De Tocqueville, recognized that the
survival of the New World experiment in government and the prosperity
and strength of the people were due in large measure to the
superiority of American women. A few women had urged their claims:
Abigail Adams asked her husband, a member of the Continental Congress,
"to remember the ladies" in the "new code of laws"; and Hannah Lee
Corbin of Virginia pleaded with her brother, Richard Henry Lee, to
make good the principle of "no taxation without representation" by
enfranchising widows with property.[3]
Yet the legal bondage of women continued to be overlooked. It seemed a
less obvious threat to free institutions and democratic government
than the Negro in slavery. In fact, Negro slavery presented a problem
which demanded attention again and again, flaring up alarmingly in
1820, the year Susan B. Anthony was born, when Missouri was admitted
to the Union as a slave state.[4]
* * * * *
These were some of the forces at work in the minds of Americans during
Susan's childhood. Her father, a liberal Quaker, was concerned over
the extension of slavery, and she often heard him say that he tried to
avoid purchasing cotton raised by slave labor. This early impression
of the evil of slavery was never erased.
The Quakers' respect for women's equality with men before God also
left its mark on young Susan. As soon as she was old enough she went
regularly to Meeting with her father, for all of the Anthonys were
Quakers. They had migrated to western Massachusetts from Rhode Island,
and there on the frontier had built prosperous farms, comfortable
homes, and a meeting house where they could worship God in their own
way. Susan, sitting with the women and children on the hand-hewn
benches near the big fireplace in the meeting house[5] which her
ancestors had built, found peace and consecration in the simple
unordered service, in the long reverent silence broken by both the men
and the women in the congregation as they were led to say a prayer or
give out a helpful message. Forty families now worshiped here, the
women sitting on one side and the men on the other; but women took
their places with men in positions of honor, Susan's own grandmother,
Hannah Latham Anthony, an elder, sitting in the "high seat," and her
aunt, Hannah Anthony Hoxie, preaching as the spirit moved her. With
this valuation of women accepted as a matter of course in her church
and family circle, Susan took it for granted that it existed
everywhere.
Although her father was a devout Friend, she discovered that he had
the reputation of thinking for himself, following the "inner light"
even when its leading differed from the considered judgment of his
fellow Quakers. For this he became a hero to her, especially after she
heard the romantic story of his marriage to Lucy Read who was not a
Quaker. The Anthonys and the Reads had been neighbors for years, and
Lucy was one of the pupils at the "home school" which Grandfather
Humphrey Anthony had built for his children on the farm, under the
weeping willow at the front gate. Daniel and Lucy were schoolmates
until Daniel at nineteen was sent to Richard Mott's Friends' boarding
school at Nine Partners on the Hudson. When he returned as a teacher,
he found his old playmate still one of the pupils, but now a beautiful
tall young woman with deep blue eyes and glossy brown hair. Full of
fun, a good dancer, and always dressed in the prettiest clothes, she
was the most popular girl in the neighborhood. Promptly Daniel Anthony
fell in love with her, but an almost insurmountable obstacle stood in
the way: Quakers were not permitted to "marry out of Meeting." This,
however, did not deter Daniel.
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts]
It was harder for Lucy to make up her mind. She enjoyed parties,
dances, and music. She had a full rich voice, and as she sat at her
spinning wheel, singing and spinning, she often wished that she could
"go into a ten acre lot with the bars down"[6] and let her voice out.
If she married Daniel, she would have to give all this up, but she
decided in favor of Daniel. A few nights before the wedding, she went
to her last party and danced until four in the morning while Daniel
looked on and patiently waited until she was ready to leave.
For his transgression of marrying out of Meeting, Daniel had to face
the elders as soon as he returned from his wedding trip. They weighed
the matter carefully, found him otherwise sincere and earnest, and
decided not to turn him out. Lucy gave up her dancing and her singing.
She gave up her pretty bright-colored dresses for plain somber
clothes, but she did not adopt the Quaker dress or use the "plain
speech." She went to meeting with Daniel but never became a Quaker,
feeling always that she could not live up to their strict standard of
righteousness.[7]
This was Susan's heritage--Quaker discipline and austerity lightened
by her father's independent spirit and by the kindly understanding of
her mother who had not forgotten her own fun-loving girlhood; an
environment where men and women were partners in church and at home,
where hard physical work was respected, where help for the needy and
unfortunate was spontaneous, and where education was regarded as so
important that Grandfather Anthony built a school for his children and
the neighbors' in his front yard. Her childhood was close enough to
the Revolution to make Grandfather Read's part in it very real and a
source of great pride. Eagerly and often she listened to the story of
how he enlisted in the Continental army as soon as the news of the
Battle of Lexington reached Cheshire and served with outstanding
bravery under Arnold at Quebec, Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, and
Colonel Stafford at Bennington while his young wife waited anxiously
for him throughout the long years of the war.
* * * * *
The wide valley in the Berkshire Hills where Susan grew up made a
lasting impression on her. There was beauty all about her--the fruit
trees blooming in the spring, the meadows white with daisies, the
brook splashing over the rocks and sparkling in the summer sun, the
flaming colors of autumn, the strength and companionship of the hills
when the countryside was white with snow. She seldom failed to watch
the sun set behind Greylock.
Her father's cotton mill flourished. Regarded as one of the most
promising, successful young men of the district, he soon attracted the
attention of Judge John McLean, a cotton manufacturer of Battenville,
New York, who, eager to enlarge his mills, saw in Daniel Anthony an
able manager. Daniel, always ready to take the next step ahead,
accepted McLean's offer, and on a sunny July day in 1826, Susan drove
with her family through the hills forty-four miles to the new world of
Battenville.
Here in the home of Judge McLean, she saw Negroes for the first time,
Negroes working to earn their freedom. Startled by their black faces,
she was a little afraid, but when her father explained that in the
South they could be sold like cattle and torn from their families, her
fear turned to pity.
At the district school, taught by a woman in summer and by a man in
the winter, she learned to sew, spell, read, and write, and she wanted
to study long division but the schoolmaster, unable to teach it, saw
no reason why a woman should care for such knowledge. Her father, then
realizing the need of better education for his five children, Guelma,
Susan, Hannah, Daniel, and Mary, established a school for them in the
new brick building where he had opened a store. Later on when their
new brick house was finished, he set aside a large room for the
school, and here for the first time in that district the pupils had
separate seats, stools without backs, instead of the usual benches
around the schoolroom walls. He engaged as teachers young women who
had studied a year or two in a female seminary; and because female
seminaries were rare in those days, women teachers with up-to-date
training were hard to find. Only a few visionaries believed in the
education of women. Nearby Emma Willard's recently established Troy
Female Seminary was being watched with interest and suspicion. Mary
Lyon, who had not yet founded her own seminary at Mt. Holyoke, was
teaching at Zilpha Grant's school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and one
of her pupils, Mary Perkins, came to Battenville to teach the Anthony
children. Mary Perkins brought new methods and new studies to the
little school. She introduced a primer with small black illustrations
which fascinated Susan. She taught the children to recite poetry,
drilled them regularly in calisthenics, and longed to add music as
well, but Daniel Anthony forbade this, for Quakers believed that music
might seduce the thoughts of the young. So Susan, although she often
had a song in her heart, had to repress it and never knew the joy of
singing the songs of childhood.
Her father, looking upon the millworkers as part of his family,
started an evening school for them, often teaching it himself or
calling in the family teacher. He organized a temperance society among
the workers, and all signed a pledge never to drink distilled liquor.
When he opened a store in the new brick building, he refused to sell
liquor, although Judge McLean warned him it would ruin his trade.
Daniel Anthony went even further. He resolved not to serve liquor when
the millworkers' houses were built and the neighbors came to the
"raising." Again Judge McLean protested, feeling certain that the men
and boys would demand their gin and their rum, but Susan and her
sisters helped their mother serve lemonade, tea, coffee, doughnuts,
and gingerbread in abundance. The men joked a bit about the lack of
strong drink which they expected with every meal, but they did not
turn away from the good substitutes which were offered and they were
on hand for the next "raising." Hearing all of this discussed at home,
Susan, again proud of her father, ardently advocated the cause of
temperance.
* * * * *
The mill was still of great interest to her and she watched every
operation closely in her spare time, longing to try her hand at the
work. One day when a "spooler" was ill, Susan and her sister Hannah
eagerly volunteered to take her place. Their father was ready to let
them try, pleased by their interest and curious to see what they could
do, but their mother protested that the mill was no place for
children. Finally Susan's earnest pleading won her mother's reluctant
consent, and the two girls drew lots for the job. It went to
twelve-year-old Susan on the condition that she divide her earnings
with Hannah. Every day for two weeks she went early to the mill in her
plain homespun dress, her straight hair neatly parted and smoothed
over her ears. Proudly she tended the spools. She was skillful and
quick, and received the regular wage of $1.50 a week, which she
divided with Hannah, buying with her share six pale blue coffee cups
for her mother who had allowed her this satisfying adventure.
A few weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Susan became a member of
the Society of Friends which met in nearby Easton, New York, and
learned to search her heart and ask herself, "Art thou faithful?"
Parties, dancing, and entertainments were generally ruled out of her
life as sinful, and rarely were a temptation, but occasionally her
mother, remembering her own good times, let her and her sisters go to
parties at the homes of their Presbyterian neighbors, and for this her
father was criticized at Friends' Meeting. Condemning bright colors,
frills, and jewelry as vain and worldly, Susan accepted plain somber
clothing as a mark of righteousness, and when she deviated to the
extent of wearing the Scotch-plaid coat which her mother had bought
her, she wondered if the big rent torn in it by a dog might not be
deserved punishment for her pride in wearing it.
That same year, the family moved into their new brick house of fifteen
rooms, with hard-finish plaster walls and light green woodwork, the
finest house in that part of the country. Here Susan's brother Merritt
was born the next April, and her two-year-old sister, Eliza, died.
Susan, Guelma, and Hannah continued their studies longer than most
girls in the neighborhood, for Quakers not only encouraged but
demanded education for both boys and girls. As soon as Susan and her
sister Guelma were old enough, they taught the "home" school in the
summer when the younger children attended, and then went further
afield to teach in nearby villages. At fifteen Susan was teaching a
district school for $1.50 a week and board, and although it was hard
for her to be away from home, she accepted it as a Friend's duty to
provide good education for children. Now Presbyterian neighbors
criticized her father, protesting that well-to-do young ladies should
not venture into paid work.
Daniel Anthony was now a wealthy man, his factory the largest and most
prosperous in that part of the country, and he could afford more and
better education for his daughters. He sent Guelma, the eldest, to
Deborah Moulson's Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia, where for $125
a year "the inculcation of the principles of Humility, Morality, and
Virtue" received particular attention; and when Guelma was asked to
stay on a second year as a teacher, he suggested that Susan join her
there as a pupil.
* * * * *
It was a long journey from Battenville to Philadelphia in 1837, and
when Susan left her home on a snowy afternoon with her father, she
felt as if the parting would be forever. Her first glimpse of the
world beyond Battenville interested her immensely until her father
left her at the seminary, and then she confessed to her diary, "Oh
what pangs were felt. It seemed impossible for me to part with him. I
could not speak to bid him farewell."[8] She tried to comfort herself
by writing letters, and wrote so many and so much that Guelma often
exclaimed, "Susan, thee writes too much; thee should learn to be
concise." As it was a rule of the seminary that each letter must first
be written out carefully on a slate, inspected by Deborah Moulson,
then copied with care, inspected again, and finally sent out after
four or five days of preparation, all spontaneity was stifled and her
letters were stilted and overvirtuous. This censorship left its mark,
and years later she confessed, "Whenever I take my pen in hand, I
always seem to be mounted on stilts."[9]
To her diary she could confide her real feelings--her discouragement
over her lack of improvement and her inability to understand her many
"sins," such as not dotting an _i_, too much laughter, or smiling at
her friends instead of reproving them for frivolous conduct. She
wrote, "Thought so much of my resolutions to do better in the future
that even my dreams were filled with these desires.... Although I have
been guilty of much levity and nonsensical conversation, and have also
admitted thoughts to occupy my mind which should have been far distant
from it, I do not consider myself as having committed any wilful
offense but perhaps the reason I cannot see my own defects is because
my heart is hardened."[10]
The girls studied a variety of subjects, arithmetic, algebra,
literature, chemistry, philosophy, physiology, astronomy, and
bookkeeping. Men came to the school to conduct some of the classes,
and Deborah Moulson was also assisted by several student teachers, one
of whom, Lydia Mott, became Susan's lifelong friend. Susan worked
hard, for she was a conscientious child, but none of her efforts
seemed to satisfy Deborah Moulson, who was a hard taskmaster. Her
reproofs cut deep, and once when Susan protested that she was always
censured while Guelma was praised, Deborah Moulson sternly replied,
"Thy sister Guelma does the best she is capable of, but thou dost not.
Thou hast greater abilities and I demand of thee the best of thy
capacity."[11]
Mail from home was a bright spot, bringing into those busy austere
days news of her friends, and when she read that one of them had
married an old widower with six children, she reflected sagely, "I
should think any female would rather live and die an old maid."[12]
Then came word that her father's business had been so affected by the
financial depression that the family would have to give up their home
in Battenville. Sorrowfully she wrote in her diary, "O can I ever
forget that loved residence in Battenville, and no more to call it
home seems impossible."[13] It helped little to realize that countless
other families throughout the country were facing the future penniless
because banks had failed, mills were shut down, and work on canals and
railroads had ceased. In April 1838, Daniel Anthony came to the
seminary to take his daughters home.
Susan felt keenly her father's sorrow over the failure of his business
and the loss of the home he had built for his family, and she resolved
at once to help out by teaching in Union Village, New York. In May
1838, she wrote in her diary, "On last evening ... I again left my
home to mingle with strangers which seems to be my sad lot. Separation
was rendered more trying on account of the embarrassing condition of
our business affairs, an inventory was expected to be taken today of
our furniture by assignees.... Spent this day in school, found it
small and quite disorderly. O, may my patience hold out to persevere
without intermission."[14]
Her patience did hold out, and also her courage, as the news came from
home telling her how everything had to be sold to satisfy the
creditors, the furniture, her mother's silver spoons, their clothing
and books, the flour, tea, coffee, and sugar in the pantries. She
rejoiced to hear that Uncle Joshua Read from Palatine Bridge, New
York, had come to the rescue, had bought their most treasured and
needed possessions and turned them over to her mother.
On a cold blustery March day in 1839, when she was nineteen, Susan
moved with her family two miles down the Battenkill to the little
settlement of Hardscrabble, later called Center Falls, where her
father owned a satinet factory and grist mill, built in more
prosperous times. These were now heavily mortgaged but he hoped to
save them. They moved into a large house which had been a tavern in
the days when lumber had been cut around Hardscrabble. It was
disappointing after their fine brick house in Battenville, but they
made it comfortable, and their love for and loyalty to each other made
them a happy family anywhere. As it had been a halfway house on the
road to Troy and travelers continued to stop there asking for a meal
or a night's lodging, they took them in, and young Daniel served them
food and nonintoxicating drinks at the old tavern bar.
Susan, when her school term was over, put her energies into housework,
recording in her diary, "Did a large washing today.... Spent today at
the spinning wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards
of carpet yesterday."[15]
The attic of the tavern had been finished off for a ballroom with
bottles laid under the floor to give a nice tone to the music of the
fiddles, and now the young people of the village wanted to hold their
dancing school there. Susan's father, true to his Quaker training,
felt obliged to refuse, but when they came the second time to tell him
that the only other place available was a disreputable tavern where
liquor was sold, he relented a little, and talked the matter over with
his wife and daughters. Lucy Anthony, recalling her love of dancing,
urged him to let the young people come. Finally he consented on the
condition that Guelma, Hannah, and Susan would not dance. They agreed.
Every two weeks all through the winter, the fiddles played in the
attic room and the boys and girls of the neighborhood danced the
Virginia reel and their rounds and squares, while the three Quaker
girls sat around the wall, watching and longing to join in the fun.
Such frivolous entertainment in the home of a Quaker could not be
condoned, and Daniel Anthony was not only severely censured by the
Friends but read out of Meeting, "because he kept a place of amusement
in his house." But he did not regret his so-called sin any more than
he regretted marrying out of Meeting. He continued to attend Friends'
Meeting, but grew more and more liberal as the years went by. At this
time, like all Quakers, he refused to vote, not wishing in any way to
support a government that believed in war, and this influenced Susan
who for some years regarded voting as unimportant. He refused to pay
taxes for the same reason, and she often saw him put his pocketbook on
the table and then remark drily to the tax collector, "I shall not
voluntarily pay these taxes. If thee wants to rifle my pocketbook,
thee can do so."[16]
* * * * *
To help her father with his burden of debt was now Susan's purpose in
life, and in the spring she again left the family circle to teach at
Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, New York. There
were twenty-eight day pupils and a few boarders at the seminary, and
for long periods while Eunice Kenyon was ill, Susan took full charge.
She wrote her family all the little details of her life, but their
letters never came often enough to satisfy her. Occasionally she
received a paper or a letter from Aaron McLean, Judge McLean's
grandson, who had been her good friend and Guelma's ever since they
had moved to Battenville. His letters almost always started an
argument which both of them continued with zest. After hearing the
Quaker preacher, Rachel Barker, she wrote him, "I guess if you would
hear her you would believe in a woman's preaching. What an absurd
notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient
for anything but domestic concerns."[17]
When New Rochelle welcomed President Van Buren with a parade, bands
playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young
woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her
disapproval in a letter to Aaron.
Disturbed over the treatment Negroes received at Friends' Meeting in
New Rochelle, she impulsively wrote him, "The people about here are
anti-abolitionist and anti everything else that's good. The Friends
raised quite a fuss about a colored man sitting in the meeting house,
and some left on account of it.... What a lack of Christianity is
this!"[18]
Her school term of fifteen weeks, for which she was paid $30, was over
early in September, just in time for her to be at home for Guelma's
wedding to Aaron McLean, and afterward she stayed on to teach the
village school in Center Falls. This made it possible for her to join
in the social life of the neighborhood. Often the young people drove
to nearby villages, twenty buggies in procession. On a drive to
Saratoga, her escort asked her to give up teaching to marry him. She
refused, as she did again a few years later when a Quaker elder tried
to entice her with his fine house, his many acres, and his sixty cows.
Although she had reached the age of twenty, when most girls felt they
should be married, she was still particular, and when a friend married
a man far inferior mentally, she wrote in her diary, "'Tis strange,
'tis passing strange that a girl possessed of common sense should be
willing to marry a lunatic--but so it is."[19]
During the next few years, both she and Hannah taught school almost
continuously, for $2 to $2.50 a week. Time and time again Susan
replaced a man who had been discharged for inefficiency. Although she
made a success of the school, she discovered that she was paid only a
fourth the salary he had received, and this rankled.
Almost everywhere except among Quakers, she encountered a false
estimate of women which she instinctively opposed. After spending
several months with relatives in Vermont, where she had the unexpected
opportunity of studying algebra, she stopped over for a visit with
Guelma and Aaron in Battenville, where Aaron was a successful
merchant. Eagerly she told them of her latest accomplishment. Aaron
was not impressed. Later at dinner when she offered him the delicious
cream biscuits which she had baked, he remarked with his most
tantalizing air of male superiority, "I'd rather see a woman make
biscuits like these than solve the knottiest problem in algebra."
"There is no reason," she retorted, "why she should not be able to do
both."[20]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Report of the International Council of Women_, 1888 (Washington,
1888), p. 163.
[2] Charles B. Waite, "Who Were the Voters in the Early History of
This Country?" _Chicago Law Times_, Oct., 1888.
[3] Janet Whitney, _Abigail Adams_ (Boston, 1947), p. 129. In 1776,
Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, at the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia, "In the new code of laws which I suppose it
will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the
ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors!
Do not put such unlimited powers into the hands of husbands. Remember
all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and
attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a
rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we
have no voice or representation." Ethel Armes, _Stratford Hall_
(Richmond, Va., 1936), pp. 206-209.
[4] Under the Missouri Compromise, Maine was admitted as a free state,
Missouri as a slave state, and slavery was excluded from all of the
Louisiana Purchase, north of latitude 36°31'.
[5] The meeting house, built in 1783, is still standing. It is owned
by the town of Adams, and cared for by the Adams Society of Friends
Descendants. Susan traced her ancestry to William Anthony of Cologne
who migrated to England and during the reign of Edward VI, was made
Chief Graver of the Royal Mint and Master of the Scales, holding this
office also during the reign of Queen Mary and part of Queen
Elizabeth's reign. In 1634, one of his descendants, John Anthony,
settled in Rhode Island, and just before the Revolution, his great
grandson, David, Susan's great grandfather, bought land near Adams,
Massachusetts, then regarded as the far West.
[6] Ida Husted Harper, _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_
(Indianapolis, 1898), I, p. 10.
[7] Daniel and Susannah Richardson Read gave Lucy and Daniel Anthony
land for their home, midway between the Anthony and Read farms. Here
Susan was born in a substantial two-story, frame house, built by her
father.
[8] Ms., Diary, 1837.
[9] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 25.
[10] Ms., Diary, Jan. 21, Feb. 10, 1838
[11] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 31.
[12] Ms., Diary, Feb. 26, 1838.
[13] _Ibid._, Feb. 6, 1838.
[14] _Ibid._, May 7, 1838.
[15] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 36.
[16] _Ibid._, p. 37.
[17] _Ibid._, p. 40.
[18] _Ibid._, p. 39.
[19] _Ibid._
[20] _Ibid._, pp. 43-44.
WIDENING HORIZONS
Unable to recoup his business losses in Center Falls and losing even
the satinet factory, Susan's father had looked about in Virginia and
Michigan as well as western New York for an opportunity to make a
fresh start. A farm on the outskirts of Rochester looked promising,
and with the money which Lucy Anthony had inherited from Grandfather
Read and which had been held for her by Uncle Joshua Read, the first
payment had been made on the farm by Uncle Joshua, who held it in his
name and leased it to Daniel.[21] Had it been turned over to Susan's
mother, it would have become Daniel Anthony's property under the law
and could have been claimed by his creditors.
Only Susan, Merritt, and Mary climbed into the stage with their
parents, early in November 1845, on the first lap of their journey to
their new home, near Rochester, New York. Guelma and Hannah[22] were
both married and settled in homes of their own, and young Daniel,
clerking in Lenox, had decided to stay behind.
After a visit with Uncle Joshua at Palatine Bridge, they boarded a
line boat on the Erie Canal, taking with them their gray horse and
wagon; and surrounded by their household goods, they moved slowly
westward. Standing beside her father in the warm November sunshine,
Susan watched the strong horses on the towpath, plodding patiently
ahead, and heard the wash of the water against the prow and the noisy
greeting of boat horns. As they passed the snug friendly villages
along the canal and the wide fertile fields, now brown and bleak after
the harvest, she wondered what the new farm would be like and what the
future would bring; and at night when the lights twinkled in the
settlements along the shore, she thought longingly of her old home and
the sisters she had left behind.
After a journey of several days, they reached Rochester late in the
afternoon. Her father took the horse and wagon off the boat, and in
the chill gray dusk drove them three miles over muddy roads to the
farm. It was dark when they arrived, and the house was cold, empty,
and dismal, but after the fires were lighted and her mother had cooked
a big kettle of cornmeal mush, their spirits revived. Within the next
few days they transformed it into a cheerful comfortable home.
The house on a little hill overlooked their thirty-two acres. Back of
it was the barn, a carriage house, and a little blacksmith shop.[23]
Looking out over the flat snowy fields toward the curving Genesee
River and the church steeples in Rochester, Susan often thought
wistfully of the blue hills around Center Falls and Battenville and of
the good times she had had there.
The winter was lonely for her in spite of the friendliness of their
Quaker neighbors, the De Garmos, and the Quaker families in Rochester
who called at once to welcome them. Her father found these neighbors
very congenial and they readily interested him in the antislavery
movement, now active in western New York. Within the next few months,
several antislavery meetings were held in the Anthony home and opened
a new world to Susan. For the first time she heard of the Underground
Railroad which secretly guided fugitive slaves to Canada and of the
Liberty party which was making a political issue of slavery. She
listened to serious, troubled discussion of the annexation of Texas,
bringing more power to the proslavery block, which even the
acquisition of free Oregon could not offset. She read antislavery
tracts and copies of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_, borrowed
from Quaker friends; and on long winter evenings, as she sat by the
fire sewing, she talked over with her father the issues they raised.
When spring came and the trees and bushes leafed out, she took more
interest in the farm, discovering its good points one by one--the
flowering quince along the driveway, the pinks bordering the walk to
the front door, the rosebushes in the yard, and cherry trees, currant
and gooseberry bushes in abundance. Her father planted peach and apple
orchards and worked the "sixpenny farm,"[24] as he called it, to the
best of his ability, but the thirty-two acres seemed very small
compared with the large Anthony and Read farms in the Berkshires, and
he soon began to look about for more satisfying work. This he found a
few years later with the New York Life Insurance Company, then
developing its business in western New York. Very successful in this
new field, he continued in it the rest of his life, but he always kept
the farm for the family home.
* * * * *
The first member of the family to leave the Rochester farm was Susan.
The cherry trees were in bloom when she received an offer from
Canajoharie Academy to teach the female department. As Canajoharie was
across the river from Uncle Joshua Read's home in Palatine Bridge and
he was a trustee of the academy, she read between the lines his kindly
interest in her. He was an influential citizen of that community, a
bank director and part owner of the Albany-Utica turnpike and the
stage line to Schenectady. Accepting the offer at once, she made the
long journey by canal boat to Canajoharie, and early in May 1846 was
comfortably settled in the home of Uncle Joshua's daughter, Margaret
Read Caldwell.
She soon loved Margaret as a sister and was devoted to her children.
None of her new friends were Quakers and she enjoyed their social life
thoroughly, leaving behind her forever the somber clothing which she
had heretofore regarded as a mark of righteousness. She began her
school with twenty-five pupils and a yearly salary of approximately
$110. This was more than she had ever earned before, and for the first
time in her life she spent her money freely on herself.